Stories, Novels, and Essays
by Charles W. Chesnutt
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Publisher description: Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with searching explorations of the meaning of race and innovative use of African American speech and folklore. Rejecting genteel Victorian hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of Jim Crow with novels and stories of formal clarity-creating, in the process, the modern African American novel. The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a show more writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) tells, as no previous novel ever had, of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era, based largely on the Wilmington race riot. Nine uncollected short stories, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman, round out a selection of the author's fiction. Eight essays highlight Chesnutt's prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
"The conjure woman", "The wife of his youth and other stories of the color line", "The house behind the cedars", "The marrow of tradition", " Uncollected stories", "Selected essays"
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Author Information
38+ Works 2,345 Members
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Belongs to Publisher Series
Library of America (131)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Stories, Novels, and Essays
- Original publication date
- 2002-01-10
- Publisher's editor
- Sollors, Werner
- Disambiguation notice
- This is an omnibus unique to the Library of America; therefore, all CK facts apply to this publication only.
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- Reviews
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- Rating
- (4.39)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
- ASINs
- 2
